Thursday 25 December 2014

Merry Christmas !


How better to wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year 2015
than with the words of Mr. Armitage himself?

A well balanced and charitable message this year - and via the new medium Twitter, that for the first time allows me to embed the message here ( so of course I can't resist):




The direct link to Mr. Armitage's recommended charities on Just Giving.

I hope you will have joyful Christmas days and wish you all the best for the holidays and the new year 2015 !

glitter-graphics.com
(Yes, the image has a relationship to RA and fandom and fans and ... - Of fans and of mice having fun besides the desirable red ...)

Sunday 21 December 2014

Should keep my mouth closed ...


Uttering some intent just does not work out for me!
 See what happened after my last post.
I merely utter my plans to continue with "Intrigue" and total chaos comes out of it.

When I finally had managed to get up ahead of work and keep up with the day to day business, I thought I could sit down, relax a bit and get back to my story "Intrigue".
The next thing that happens is, my telephone (business phone line) and internet stop working, not entirely, but break off every few minutes and need some more minutes to come back and work for a few minutes, before the whole thing starts all over again.

So, what do I do, of course - my daily business anyway, call the hotline. [Can I suggest 'hotline' for the "Unwort des Jahres"? It certainly is mine!]

The first hotline lady, I soon bring to the end of her wisdome with my case, so I am transferred to a technical guy, who makes me restart, reset, test and re-do everything imaginable, till he is at the end of his wisdom as well. So we settle for a replacement of the router, to at least try to solve the strange problem. (Did I ever say I had 'normal' hotline problems? - Well, never the easy stuff for me.)
So, I wait patiently for the replacement router, go to my parents and their internet connection ín the meanwhile to work from there, but for reasons unknown, the connection there is almost as bumpy as my own. Then the replacement arrives and, at first, does not work either - though not in the same way, but completely not. After days of trying to get it to work and then in my desperation completely ignoring the given setup instructions, I can finally bring the thing to work ;o)

Long storry short, my nerves are nonexistent now, as the breakdown quite naturally happened, when I had a list of online contractual work to complete.
I am still behind with that and it is not likely I will catch up any time soon.



The end result of it all is:
  • Now I am back in my normal chaos. All effort to the contrary was in vain.
  • The continuation of "Intrigue" is uncertain again and delayed indefinitely. Sorry !!!
  • I even did not manage my annual CD-celebration post, which I normally do, even when writing only rarely.
  • RA was not available in time to compensate the pressure during this chaos, because the internet connection was too twitchy and The Hobbit not yet out. (By now, I have seen the third part and more about that at a later time.)
  • And to hit it all off, I am searching for the source of one certain RA picture for a friend and now can't find it anywhere. If I would not have it in one of the banners and so must have the documented source files somewhere, I would think I dreamed the lovely picture. (But my twitchy file visibility is an entire mystery on itself. Or do you have file folders, which only do show up, when they like and never when you search for them? When you don't search for them, the files suddenly appear exactly where they should have been the whole time. It gets me crazy and I have no clue what causes this problem, when all the settings are to show all available files and I am the administrator with all visibility rights.)